How Instagram Brought One Nigerian Designer to the Center of West Coast Fashion

Instagram, as we all know, has an incredible power to help develop relationships. Cutting across cultures, continents, and languages, the photo-based platform can bring strangers together with just a single double tap of one’s phone screen. And within the context of the fashion world, new trends, styles, and people can land in one’s DM inbox or feed instantaneously. It’s a modern phenomenon that Nigerian designer Amaka Osakwe recently discovered can be plenty enterprising. After Oakland, California, retailer Sherri McMullen of McMullen Boutique came upon Osakwe’s deeply feminine and experimental African-inspired line, Maki Oh, in a New York showroom years ago, she was determined to have its designs available in her multi-label boutique. “Immediately I fell in love with the prints and interesting shapes,” McMullen says via email. “There is something so feminine yet so strong about the collection. I said, ‘Who is this designer? I haven’t seen anything in the market like this.’ I was intrigued. I see many collections each season, but hers stood out.”

As luck would have it, when McMullen returned the next season, Oh had switched representation, and it would take relentless “Insta stalking” to connect. But once they did, their partnership took off. “It all happened rather quickly,” Osakwe breezily explains over the phone. The Lagos-based designer—who was in New York on a stopover along a transcontinental trip that had her traveling between Nigeria, Beijing for a trade deal conference, and Oakland to talk today’s 17-piece in-store launch of her Fall 2016 collection with McMullen—immediately responded to McMullen’s mission, deeming it the perfect American home for the Maki Oh collection. Soon, McMullen had pulled in Farfetch as a partner to help push out sales of Osakwe’s designs that already counted First Lady Michelle Obama, Lupita Nyong’o, and Beyoncé as fans. “It was a no-brainer to contact Farfetch since their footprint is global and we have been partners for over six years. I contacted the chief marketing officer, Stephanie Horton, and told her about the collection. She was as excited as I hoped she’d be,” says McMullen.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for Osakwe, either. The Arts University Bournemouth graduate had been building on her collection for six years and had finally honed in on who her customer was. Pulling from her rich Nigerian culture and her experience as a black woman to imbue her line with a self-described “quiet confidence,” the label, which is completely inspired by Nigeria and Africa, reflects a more nuanced approach to exploring the African experience through design. “I always say the Maki Oh clothes are a form of communication. Every collection is inspired by the traditional way of wearing African garments, which were to relay messages, so they are forms of communication. Every piece has a meaning and the Maki Oh woman is able to embody it.”

So how will the West Coast fashion scene translate the messages embodied in these West African designs? We’ll have to wait and see, but to be sure, it will differ from the Naija woman’s approach. As Osakwe says with a laugh, “The Nigerian woman is much more flamboyant! She probably has a silk Prada turban on with [my designs], a full face of makeup, statement jewelry, and probably a tiny clutch bag. And then a pair of heels!"